22 October 2014

Via Vice, artist Katie Paterson has planted a 1,000 tree forest with the intention of them all being used for a special library of books made one year, every year, for a 100 years.

Scottish artist Katie Paterson has turned what sounds like a nonsensical question into a reality. She's planted a Future Library of 1,000 trees in a forest on the outskirts of Oslo, Norway. She'll then invite a different writer every year for the next century to write a manuscript to be held in trust, unread and unopened, until 2114. Then the trees will be harvested and turned into a special anthology of books, the first of which is being written now by speculative fiction author Margaret Atwood.

27 July 2014

The latest on the baking front for cookbooks. Included in these reviews: recipe for dark chocolate pudding, basic recipe for a gluten-free flower, and images of 4 different recipes from the Beekman farm cookbook. Click each link for the review on Cookbook Papers. Enjoy!

Puddin' is a handy one-topic cookbook to have on the baking bookshelf, with many things related to pudding to try. Recipe for the Chocolate Pudding with cocoa and 70% chocolate.

The Beekman 1802 Heirloom Dessert Cookbook is about as authentic as you
can find when it comes to old-fashioned baking. The authors, Brent
Ridges and Josh Kilmer-Purcell, divided the cookbook into seasons rather
than baking chapters, bringing a bit of their farm life into their
recipes. 4 different images of book recipes and photographs.

Gluten-free on a Shoestring Bakes Bread recipes are pretty straight forward and cover all the basic
breads you'll ever really need. If you want to experiment with your own
recipes, she gives quite a few to start off with. Below is her recipe for 'high-quality' gluten-free flour which includes rice flours and
potato flour, potato and tapioca starches, xanthan gum, and a powered
pectin, all doing their part to produce something similar to a gluten
flour when baked.

16 July 2014

This illustrated, step-by-step guide shows you how to save seeds from 20 of the most popular vegetable garden plants, including beans, carrots, peas, peppers, and tomatoes. You'll learn how each plant is pollinated (key to determining how the seed should be saved), how to select the seeds to collect, and how to process and store collected seeds. Grow the varieties you love, year after year!

Saving Vegetable Seeds: Harvest, Clean, Store, and Plant Seeds from Your Garden was a short read, but filled with all the basic information you'll really need to start saving seeds from your garden. Author Fern Marshall Bradley broke the entire process down by separating the steps into these three chapters: Getting Started with Saving Seeds; Seed-Saving Techniques; and Saving Seeds, Crop by Crop.

The beginning of the book, the basics of seeds are identified and defined, such as the cross section of a seed, the parts of a flower and how seeds form from them, and self-pollinating vs. cross-pollinating crops. In the seed saving chapter, she walks the reader through her five steps of seed saving: taking care of your plants; harvesting the seeds; cleaning and drying the seeds; packing and storing; and testing viability. Included is how to control pollination (important in open-pollinated types of vegetables), and how to hand pollinate.

Probably the most helpful for me as a gardener was how to test seed viability. I've saved lots of seeds from my garden over the years, but doing a test on the seeds viability was something I've never done. The vegetables Bradley details are beans, carrots, corn, cucumbers, lettuce, melons and watermelons, onions and leeks, peas, peppers, radishes, squash, and tomatoes.

Handy book if you are planning on doing some seed saving, with the varieties she details.

15 July 2014

Learn something new and pass it on. That's the running theme
throughout Jamie's Food Revolution. Jamie Oliver is on a quest to
educate readers on the benefits of good food and simple preparation. And by
teaching, he is hoping the newly educated cooks will pass on their knowledge
with someone else ("preferably four").

28 June 2014

Cookbook of the Week: Salad Samurai by Terry Hope Romero

There are a few reasons why I love Terry Romero’s cookbooks: engaging
text, downright delicious recipes, and the fact that you don’t even have
to be vegan to enjoy what she makes. It’s actually included in the name
her latest cookbook: Salad Samurai: 100 Cutting-Edge, Ultra-Hearty, Easy-to-Make Salads You Don’t Have to be Vegan to Love.

20 June 2014

Summer always inspires me to create. And with the help of The Magic Pattern Book,
by Amy Barickman, creating simple summer wearables is simple enough.
Start out with 6 basic wardrobe pieces and end up with 36 different
looks. Pieces included: tank top, skirt, dress, a cardigan, a coat, and
an accessory (3 different hats, a scarf, and two bags/purses). Which is
the whole concept behind the book, to take a single pattern and
completely transform it or piece it together in different ways to
'magically' create different looks.

01 May 2014

Mayim Bialik has been busy in the kitchen, and her new book Mayim’s Vegan Table
is the result. With a simple layout and quick recipes, the book would
make a welcome addition on the cookbook shelf for a home cook just
getting into vegan cooking. For veteran vegan cooks, she offers ways to
spice up the family menu.

19 March 2014

The year is 1838, and seventeen-year-old Julia Elliston’s position has never been more fragile. Orphaned and unmarried in a time when women are legal property of their fathers, husbands, and guardians, she finds herself at the mercy of an anonymous guardian who plans to establish her as a servant in far-off Scotland.With two months to devise a better plan, Julia’s first choice to marry her childhood sweetheart is denied. But when a titled dowager offers to introduce Julia into society, a realm of
possibilities opens. However, treachery and deception are as much a part of Victorian society as titles and decorum, and Julia quickly discovers her present is deeply entangled with her mother’s mysterious past. Before she knows what’s happening, Julia finds herself a pawn in a deadly game between two of the country’s most powerful men. With no laws to protect her, she must unravel the secrets on her own. But sometimes truth is elusive and knowledge is deadly.

I liked this book, I really did, but the problem with series is that they sometimes end at awful times, such as this book. But that is the end and I'll start at the beginning.

The book is set in 1838, where women in society were considered property. Finding herself in a desperate situation at 17, Julia is easily manipulated. The mystery that surrounds Mr. Macy, a man who ends up her husband, was fun to read, and I wish I had all the books to finish the story at one sitting. People in Victorian society were easily judged, and I found reading this book (and others in this time period) not so forgiving of others.

Julia never speaks up or voices her opinion. She practically goes along with whatever she is told. It may sound frustrating now, but in the early 1800s, what was a girl to do in her situation: not much else. The story is a Gothic romance, and Dotta's writing style flows easily from scene to scene. Her descriptions of what life was like back then was great. I enjoyed the many layers that she writes about, and I will look for the other books as they come out.

23 October 2013

Kara Magari is about to discover a beautiful world full of terrifying things—Ourea.

Kara, a college student still reeling from her mother’s recent death, has no idea the hidden world of Ourea even exists until a freak storm traps her in a sunken library. With no way out, she opens an ancient book of magic called the Grimoire and unwittingly becomes its master, which means Kara now wields the cursed book’s untamed power. Discovered by Ourea's royalty, she becomes an unwilling pawn in a generations-old conflict—a war intensified by her arrival. In this world of chilling creatures and betrayal, Kara shouldn’t trust anyone… but she’s being hunted and can’t survive on her own. She drops her guard when Braeden, a native soldier with a dark secret, vows to keep her safe. And though she doesn’t know it, her growing attraction to him may just be her undoing.

For twelve years, Braeden Drakonin has lived a lie. The Grimoire is his one chance at redemption, and it lands in his lap when Kara Magari comes into his life. Though he begins to care for this human girl, there is something he wants more. He wants the Grimoire.

Welcome to Ourea, where only the cunning survive.

Book One of the Grimoire Saga starts out fast enough: Kara, seeking solitude after the death of her mother, enjoys hiking in the wilderness alone. Being in the outdoors is what they did together and nature soothes her. Her hike quickly turns her world upside down as she discovers a secret passage through the Lichgates. Literally into another world.

Little does she know that what she has now become, a Vagabond and ruler of a powerful book, is something that her supposed guardian has been searching for - for twelve years. I loved this story. The author transported me into another world, and I felt I was with Kara. And while I really liked Kara and her very quick thinking at times, I so felt for Braeden and his incomplete journey to the Grimoire.

Lichgates was fast paced and well-written for a fantasy tale. It is difficult to describe another world but Boyce does it smoothly. This is a series, and Lichgates is book one. There are four books in the series: Lichgates; Treason; Heritage (soon to be published); and Illusion (anticipated in 2014). If all the books bring the characters to life as the first one, this will be a great series to collect.

10 October 2013

If you are a self-published author who wants to sell more books, a new publisher looking for ways to market your content without breaking the bank, or a growing publisher searching for the latest tools to take your business to the next level, then "The Book Publishers Toolkit: 10 Practical Pointers for Independent and Self Publishers Volume 1," will bring you the hands-on tools and techniques needed to navigate an industry where the only constant is perpetual change.

Whether you want to jump-start your marketing efforts, expand your social media outreach, get how-to ebook tips and much more, you’ll find hands-on tools in these pages. Written by a wide variety of talented professionals who generously donate their time, energy and expertise to IBPA, the not-for-profit Independent Book Publishers Association, each piece originally appeared in the "Independent," IBPA’s monthly member magazine.

The experts putting this book or 'toolkit' together - just worked on what really matters in the world of book publishing. Rather than it being a how to guide to step by step publishing, it is a series of articles relating to the world.

The 10 article titles: Getting and Using Awards; Tapping Into Twitter Expertise; Let's Hear It for the Long Tail; Acquiring the Right Rights: Will Your Contract Keep Up with the Markets for Your Books; A Librarian Talks About Choosing Books to Buy; Build a Powerful Platform with a Simple Brand Audit; Marketing Plans for First Books; Why Authors Hate Social Networking, and How to Get Them to Promote Books Online Anyway; Growing Connections That Count; and E-book Conversions: Ten Pointers to Ensure Reader Enjoyment (and Minimize Ebook Returns).

As the titles suggest, just about everything is covered in a tips and tools sort of way. Hearing about the different authors firsthand account of writing situations made it much more valuable than if this were simply a do-it-yourself guide.

Thirty Minute Pasta by Giuliano Hazan has a little
bit of everything related to pastas, not just recipes. Contents include The Many
Shapes of Pastas where he details different pastas, both flour and water and egg
pastas, and suggests best pairings for them: tagliatelle for Bolognese Sauce;
bucatini for robust sauces; fusilli and rigatoni for chunky sauces; cavatappi
for soups; and spahettini for simple, savory sauces.

05 October 2013

As with other Belle's work, the characters are well-defined and likable.
Even the guy who has long lost interest in his supposed life partner.
Connie Chatterley uproots her life to move across the country with her
long term boyfriend, Cliff, for a business opportunity. It seems he is a
tech genius focused on his business and the possibility to change their
lives forever financially. Unfortunately, this comes at a cost as the
more effort he puts into the business, the less he puts in his
relationship with Connie. Eventually, it is as though Cliff treats
Connie as if she wasn't there.

Search This Blog

Follow me on Twitter

Succotash Reviews contains book reviews from reading or writing clubs I belong to, from books that publishers send to me for review purposes, gems from the library or bookstores, and my bookshelf. There are also links to different reviews I've done on other sites.

I like to read - therefore, I have a mix of different new and archival cookbooks, historical ichthyology, old pastry and baking books, non-fiction, and of course, fiction.

All opinions are my own. Click the "About Succotash Reviews" above for information on my reviews. Thanks for stopping by!

Renee Shelton.Butcher. Baker. Old Book Hunter-Gatherer.

sandandsuccotash at gmail.com

Friends Who Enjoy Books and Use GFC

Google+ Followers

FeedBurner FeedCount

Friends Who Read and Use Linky

Favorite Books List

An ever changing list, here are my favorite books in different genres:

Jewelry/Craft:Metal Clay Fusion by Gordon K. UyeharaSewing:Improv Sewing by Nicole BlumCookbook:Whatever Happened to Sunday Dinner? by Lisa CaponigriYA Fiction:Moonflower by EDC JohnsonThriller:Dead Laywers Tell No Tales by Randy SingerSuspense:Messages by John Michael HilemanFantasy:Assassin by Matthew IdenRomance:Blaze of Winter by Elisabeth BarrettShort Story:They by David Morrell